Where is the Pie?

Where’s the Pie?
No, unfortunately, we aren’t talking about our family’s favorite recipe, but instead the market for your products or services that marketers compare to a pie. In marketing language the pie represents all those customers buying your product from somewhere. The size of the pie includes consumers who could reasonably be willing to buy from you. Ok, ok, it’s true I liked economics. My professor thought I was really strange because it made sense to me…now I just have to see if the important bits can make sense to you, too.

How Big is the Pie?
What are the boundaries of your market? Your pie can include everyone in the local city, or even wider, in a county and beyond. If you sell online, it includes people looking for your product or service on the internet. If, like me, you can provide your service to anyone anywhere, then your pie is a really big national or even international one. But for most brick and mortar stores, it is people who live here, live nearby, who are visiting or even driving through on their way to the beach.
The tricky thing about the market pie is that it changes size. It is not always the same. Your 65 year-old customers may stop buying products they loved ten years ago. The local 18 year-old folks, who just started working, are now potential customers with money to spend, hopefully in your store. People moving into the area get added to the market. So while some parts shrink, others expand.

Who Cares?
Why should you care about this pie? Because it might be bigger than you know, which means you may have access to more customers (and sales) than your current marketing plan includes. How big your piece of this pie is, your market share, depends on how big the total pie is. So, if you expand your market to reach out to customers in other places, in other age groups, the pie gets bigger (more total customers) and now your share in this bigger market is also larger. That, of course, means more customers and sales for your goods or services!

Getting Your Share
Now we are back to the dreaded work of marketing. If your market does not know you exist, then you don’t exist–for them anyway. If they can’t find you in the places they frequent, whether that is the newspaper, radio, internet, local hotels, their email inbox or the community bulletin board, then they won’t know about your great products, sales events or loyalty program. And I hate to be the one to bring bad news, but that means someone else is getting your piece of the pie.
The process of trying to increase your market share is constant. You can never stop trying to win new customers. And everything in business comes back to your customers. Who are they? Where are they? Are you reaching them?
So now you get to think about where your potential customers hang out looking for local products or services. When they are new in town who do they call or what do they read to find out how who to do business with? When they are visiting and staying in a hotel how do they know you are here? What search terms are they using in Google for local shopping and does your name come up in the list?